Tuesday, October 21, 2008

In strength training routines it's fairly common to do a program specifically tailored to improving one lift or one area of training. Often theses routines call for high intenstiy or a high volume of specific work on a certain area and often they are pretty effective at boosting personal bests.

The problem is that sometimes after you finish a high intensity deadlift routine or a high volume squat routine you enter a period where even looking at those exercises is enough to make you want ot leave the gym and because of that you may start to slide backwards!

One solution to this problem of temporary mental burnout is to avoid the exercise in question and focus on a variety of related exercises so that you can maintain your newfound strength or fitness gains but also maintain your enthusiasm for training.

As a quick example if you've just done a heavy deadlift routine and set a new personal best take 2- 4 weeks and focus on the following exercises

Partial deadlift pulls from above the kneePower cleans or power snatchesClean pulls with 50 - 70% of your best deadlift.Good morningsKettlebell Swings

If you include a couple of those exercises in place of Deadlifts you may even find that you work on weak points in the deadlift and when you return to full deadlifts that your numbers jump up again!

Here is a short video from my training of some partial deadlifts.

Remember if you are interested in Olympic lifting or serious strength training, we are running a workshop on the 30th of November at Olympic park in Sydney!

Monday, October 20, 2008

I've got a confession to make. Despite being a fitness trainer I'm really not a morning person. I often find it hard to get going in the morning and generally before I can get anything productive done I need to get my blood flowing.

The problem I have had in the past is that I like to do my major workouts in the afternoon and doing a second 40-60 minute session in the morning is too time consuming.

Therefore recently I've been experimenting with some 5 minute mini workouts that I can do with little or no warm up and with just a couple of bits of equipment that I can keep in my living room. The aim here is a quick convenient workout to kick my body and brain into gear not to flog myself (that comes in the afternoon workouts)

One quick note - if you are going to do these workouts pick a kettlebell that is one size (4kg for women and 8kg for men) lighter than what you would use for a full workout. So if you regularly swing a 32kg drop back to a 24kg.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Over the past few years of training people with kettlebell and CrossFit methods I've noticed something.

Even though from session to session these workouts are highly varied and challenging, quite often when athletes are given a workout they'll mentally start to break it down and pace themsleves. Conserving energy in one area in anticipation of a harder exercise thats coming up. For example a good runner might ease off on the run because they know that a set of 30 burpees is up next.

The other day while training a group of three clients (all of them experienced in my regular training methods) I thought i'd try something slightly different.

After a warm up and a brief kettlebell strength workout I laid out their conditioning for the day.

1. Set out on a lap of the oval2. As each individual arrives back at the start point they will be given a mini workout to complete before heading out again on the next lap3. The mini workout will be different for each client, each lap.

This workout turned out to be one of the hardest both physically and mentally that the group have done. At the end all three of them looked like they were about to collapse!

So if you want to spice up your workouts and introduce an element of unpredicatability I suggest getting a friend (or enemy) to write out say 3 - 6 little mini workouts and stuff them in an envelope then head out to the park or gym and start pulling stuff out at random and hammer through them as fast as possible.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Last friday the NSW Junior Weightlifting team flew to Melbourne to compete in the junior nationals.

For many of the guys it was their first major competition and I was pretty impressed by the way they handled the pressure and came out firing on the platform.

Other states had bigger teams but it seemed like a fair number of lifters on those teams had been rushed into the competition and to be honest some of the technique displayed was pretty bad and in some cases downright dangerous! I'm not blaming the athletes for that but questions should probably be asked of coaches who allow their lifters to pull maximal weights off the ground with badly rounded backs.

Monday, October 6, 2008

As regular readers of my newsletter will know I run Kettlebell Instructors Courses all around Australia. In 2008 I've been fortunate enough to travel to every capital city in Australia except Canberra (see you guys early 2009!) to run the courses.

A highlight of every course is the final few minutes when participants are put through a timed snatch test to demonstrate just how tough kettlebell training can be!

Here is a short video of the most recent instructors course in Sydney being put through their paces.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Just a quick post todaay before I fly out to Melbourne for the Junior weightlifting nationals.

I've been fortunate this year to be heavily involved in the recruitment and training of our state team and after a lot of hard work it's good to be taking such a large team (13 lifters and staff!) to the comp.

In case you need some motivation to train this weekend consider this.

After less than one year of training two of our juniors are snatching bodyweight.

One of our lifters, 14 yr old John Carty has lost 60kg (not a typo!) training with us this year.

I'm going to be pretty busy coaching and organising the team but I'll try to remember to take photos and post some when I get back on Monday.